Metaphysical toxins — i.e., the concentrated vibrations of terror, grief, frustration, and desperation permeating these foods — are invisible and completely unrecognized by conventional science, yet they may be even more disturbing to us than physical toxins because they work on the level of feelings and consciousness, which are more essential dimensions of ourselves than our physical vehicle.
Physicists are beginning to glimpse the truth that mystics and sages have been pointing toward for centuries, that the world that appears to us through our senses is a vibrational phenomenon. Energy that vibrates within a certain range becomes perceptible to us as “matter,” and vibrations outside that range, though not necessarily perceptible by our senses, still exist.
Standing in a dark, quiet room, for example, we may not see or hear anything, but if we turn on a radio or television, we will suddenly become aware of the music, conversations, ads and TV programs that have been with us in the room, unperceived because we lacked the equipment to perceive them. In a similar way, we may look at an egg and see just a material thing, but if we had the necessary intuitive equipment, we could become much more aware of the egg as a vibrational entity. Though our mind may be blocked from seeing, feeling, or sensing the egg as a vibrational energy system, our body, which is also a vibratory system, will be affected by it at the essential vibratory level.
We have probably all experienced being in a physically beautiful place and noticed that if we are angry, jealous, or afraid, or if the people with us are, then the physical beauty cannot be appreciated. The converse is also true. Joy, nobility, compassion, high energy, and pure vibrations can transform any physical surrounding into a paradise, and fear or anger can make any paradise (for example, our earth) into a hell or a prison gulag. Our inability to fully recognize, appreciate, and protect the inexhaustible, spectacular beauty of our earth and of her creatures is due to our inner desensitization to vibrational energy frequencies—the numbness that keeps us from screaming or weeping when we bite into a hot dog or cheeseburger.
Our bodies know and respond to the vibrations of environments and situations, of relationships, of emotions, and especially of what we eat. It has been well known for generations that the milk of a mother who is angry or disturbed will often make her baby sick. While most scientists continue to restrict their search to materialist explanations for phenomena, modern physics, for example, is demonstrating that matter is energy and that consciousness is fundamental, far more fundamental than energy-matter.
Both the uncertainty principle and the observer effect, foundational to quantum physics, imply that the appearance of energy-matter is inseparable from and conditioned by consciousness; the universe is not fundamentally physical but is an arising in awareness, in consciousness.
As we become more alert to energy and to vibrations, we see directly the link between consciousness and matter. Our lives on the physical level are an out picturing of our thoughts and feelings—our consciousness.
Many cultures recognize that food that is prepared with love and caring attention to detail is more healthful than food that is prepared within difference or, even worse, with irritation or anger. For this reason, for example, in many Zen monasteries, only the most senior and advanced meditation monks are allowed to prepare food in the monastery kitchen.
In India, mothers have been encouraged for centuries to cook in a loving, calm, and meditative mood so that the food they prepare for their children will nourish them not only physically but also emotionally and spiritually. They believe that it is the universal energy, or prana, in food that gives us energy. The vibrational field of the person preparing the food is also a form of prana and can increase or decrease the food’s healthy vibration. There are many other cultures and religions that recognize that food is an intimate vehicle of energy and consciousness, and that when it is prepared with love, mindfulness, and gratitude, these vibrations bless and support the fortunate recipients of the food. It’s also widely recognized that when food is eaten in an attitude of mindfulness and appreciation, it’s more nourishing than if eaten in a distracted, hurried, or irritated frame of mind.
Monastic and yogic traditions have long recognized the benefit of eating mindfully and prayer-fully as a meditation, being fully in the present moment of eating, and contemplating the origin of the food and giving thanks for it. This practice is believed to increase the energy and nutritional value of our food by opening us more fully to it.
Eating is an act of connecting. Even if we eat alone, we are not alone. The food we are eating connects us with the rhythms, forces, and abundance of nature and of our universe, and with the presence of those who nurtured and gathered the foods we are eating. Fields, forests, oceans, rivers, wildlife, farmers, and grocers are all with us and become part of us as we chew and digest the food. People we think of while we are chewing and digesting our food become a part of us also.
Cross-culturally, meals are events of social bonding and communion. When we eat together as a family or a community, and especially if we do it in an attitude of appreciation of the food and the opportunity of being together, we strengthen the bonds of understanding and love between us.
If we consume animal foods, all of these elements of energy and consciousness are diminished by the violence and fear inherent in the vibration of the foods we are eating.
Since there is such an obvious and overwhelmingly strong vibration of violence, fear, and despair in animal foods, when we prepare the food we are not likely to do so mindfully, but mechanically and quickly, in order to avoid awakening our natural sensitivity. We tend to eat these foods in a disconnected way as well. To maintain our pretense that we are oblivious to the obvious horror on our plates, we eat quickly and keep ourselves busy and distracted.
Food, like all apparently physical matter, is energy and vibration and is a manifestation of consciousness, and though it is important to prepare, eat, and share food mindfully, we can see that it’s important to look more deeply than this, to the actual source of our food.
Animal foods are also toxic to us and our world for another reason. Just as we must harden and desensitize ourselves to produce and eat them, our culture must produce certain hardened people to manipulate and kill the unfortunate creatures. When we make it a goal to cultivate cruelty and remorselessness in some people, all of us are hurt. In conspiring to pretend that we do not recognize the pain we cause, we deaden the compassion, intelligence, and creativity of our children and of all our people.
Underlying this cultural deadening, of course, are our meals, our fundamental social activity. And to create these meals, we must undergo the further deadening of choosing and buying animal products. Every time we make the decision to purchase the eggs, fluids, or flesh of animals, we enforce the disconnection between consumer and what is consumed. When we take out our wallets and pay for an animal’s flesh or secretions, at that moment we directly instigate violence, fear, slavery, death, and the spread of toxic pollution. At that moment the seeds are actually sown.
Most of these operations, though they are enormous, imprisoning and killing tens and even hundreds of thousands of individuals, are hidden from public view. Huge floating death ships work far out at sea. In the countryside, animal processing facilities are purposefully located far from main roads and population centers, fenced off from public entry. Their names are vague and euphemistic.
This massive and unremitting negative energy, the despair and pain of the millions upon millions of sensitive individuals imprisoned and killed needlessly for our conditioned cravings, is perhaps the most serious pollution we humans create. Its repercussions ripple out through the vast and intricate webs of thought, energy, and consciousness that form our human relationships with each other, with animals and nature, and with our children, our dreams, and our aspirations.
Even if we attempt to prepare and eat animal foods slowly and mindfully, both the reality and our thought of what we are preparing and eating are disturbing to our natural sense of compassion for other living creatures. By desecrating animals, we create energy fields that desecrate us and block our purpose on this earth: to unfold wisdom, love, and understanding. Instead, we have become agents of ugliness and death, serving the interests of enormous industrial conglomerates and corporations that exist primarily to maximize their own self-centered profits and power. And we have hardened ourselves and our children, who like innocent sponges, soak up our attitudes and beliefs and pass them on to their children as our parents and grandparents have done.
By inflicting massive amounts of both acute pain and chronic pain on the animals we eat, we generate similarly massive amounts of acute fear and chronic fear. We eat terror and are thus fascinated with it, lured by the lurid, the grotesque, and the violent. Our fascination with blood, death, terror, and violence is a manifestation of the repressed shadow of our wholesale brutality and killing of animals, sublimated and projected into countless expressions in the mass media and in popular entertainment. Violence and horror in movies, novels, and music fascinate and attract us only because we are regularly eating violence and horror and are therefore complicit.
We dull our sensitivity when we use animals for clothing, furniture, jewelry, and other products, shutting down our awareness of the horror and torment inflicted on living beings to provide them. And we stifle our empathy in scientific research and education, where we teach each other that the suffering of non-human animals is of little consequence. It starts perhaps with school chick-hatching projects, progresses through biology lab frog dissection, and culminates in the millions of animals tortured by researchers working for the military, industrial, scientific, and educational establishments.
If we could look over the world we live in with the eyes of an angel, an intuitively awakened being, and see energy vibrations rather than just physical forms, we would see that the wars and violence on our earth are generated from a vast complex of venues where deadening takes place.
What we are, and what all beings and manifestations ultimately are, is consciousness. Consciousness manifests vehicles, which are sacred embodiments for the expression, growth, and development of consciousness. All of us are parts of something far greater, and we all have a unique purpose and contribution to make.
No being is merely a material thing or object, and no being can thus ever be a commodity or article of property. We are all infinitely mysterious manifestations of consciousness, and spiritual maturity is an awakening from the crippling limitations of materialism and separatism, accompanied by a sense of love and compassion for all creatures.
We all know that thoughts and feelings have power. We’ve seen, in both our private and public lives, how effective a strong feeling and a clear thought can be in manifesting an outcome—for an energy field is thus created that will attract others with similar vibrational tendencies, further reinforcing that energized thought form. These thought fields will reproduce after their kind.
Materialism has covered over and ignored the truth that we are all connected, that rather than separate material objects with brains that give rise to consciousness, we are infinite consciousness manifesting as beings in time and space. The evidence for this is overwhelming, both in the utterances of spiritually illumined people and in our own hearts, minds, and daily life experiences, if we open our eyes and see!
Thus, the pollution of our shared consciousness-field by the dark agonies endured by billions of animals killed for food is an unrecognized fact that impedes our social progress and contributes gigantically to human violence and the warfare that is constantly erupting around the world. Joining together to pray for and visualize world peace is certainly a noble idea, but if we continue to dine on the misery of our fellow neighbors we are creating a monumental and ongoing prayer for violence, terror, and slavery. It is the prayer of our actions, and it is the experienced reality of billions of sensitive creatures who are at our mercy and to whom we show no mercy.
Until we live our prayers for peace and freedom by granting peace and freedom to those who are vulnerable in our hands, we will find neither peace nor freedom. Joy, love, and abundance are always available to us, and will manifest in our lives to the degree that we understand that they are given to us as we give them to others.
We are conditioned mentally to disconnect our food from the animal who was mindlessly abused to provide it, but the vibrational fields created by our food choices impact us profoundly whether we pretend to ignore them or not. Practicing mindful eating illuminates these hidden connections, cleanses our mind, heart, and actions, and removes inner masks and armor so that it becomes quite plain to see.